He dressed himself accordingly, and, taking his gathered coin from its hiding-place, wrapped every piece separately in a bit of rag, slid it into his deep pocket, and sewed the pocket up.  Then he cut off enough bacon to toast on the raked-out coals for his breakfast, and hid the rest under the floor.  There was no fastening on the outside of Gaspard’s house.  He was obliged to latch the door, and leave it at the mercy of the enemy.

Nothing was stirring in the frosted world.  He could not yet see the citadel clearly, or the heights of Levis; but the ascent to Montmorenci bristled with naked trees, and in the stillness he could hear the roar of the falls.  Gaspard ambled along his belt of ground to take a last look.  It was like a patchwork quilt:  a square of wheat stubble showed here, and a few yards of brown prostrate peavines showed there; his hayfield was less than a stone’s throw long; and his garden beds, in triangles and sections of all shapes, filled the interstices of more ambitious crops.

He had nearly reached the limit of the farm, and entered his neck of woods, when the breathing of a cow trying to nip some comfort from the frosty sod delighted his ear.  The pretty milker was there, with her calf at her side.  Gaspard stroked and patted them.  Though the New Englanders should seize them for beef, he could not regret they were wending home again.  That invisible cord binding him to his own place, which had wrenched his vitals as it stretched, now drew him back like fate.  He worked several hours to make his truants a concealing corral of hay and stakes and straw and stumps at a place where a hill spring threaded across his land, and then returned between his own boundaries to the house again.

The homesick zest of one who has traveled made his lips and unshaven chin protrude, as he smelled the good interior.  There was the wooden crane.  There was his wife’s old wheel.  There was the sacred row of children’s snow-shoes, which the priest had spared from burning.  One really had to leave home to find out what home was.

But a great hubbub was beginning in Phips’s fleet.  Fifes were screaming, drums were beating, and shouts were lifted and answered by hearty voices.  After their long deliberation, the New Englanders had agreed upon some plan of attack.  Gaspard went down to his landing, and watched boatload follow boatload, until the river was swarming with little craft pulling directly for Beauport.  He looked uneasily toward Quebec.  The old lion in the citadel hardly waited for Phips to shift position, but sent the first shot booming out to meet him.  The New England cannon answered, and soon Quebec height and Levis palisades rumbled prodigious thunder, and the whole day was black with smoke and streaked with fire.

Gaspard took his gun, and trotted along his farm to the cover of the trees.  He had learned to fight in the Indian fashion; and Le Moyne de Sainte-Helene fought the same way.  Before the boatloads of New Englanders had all waded through tidal mud, and ranged themselves by companies on the bank, Sainte-Helene, who had been dispatched by Frontenac at the first drumbeat on the river, appeared, ready to check them, from the woods of Beauport.  He had, besides three hundred sharpshooters, the Lorette Hurons and the muster of Beauport militia, all men with homes to save.